Good morning! Welcome to the Canadian AI Newsletter, a weekly rundown for founders, operators and investors.
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I am Raif Barbaros, Partner at Mistral Venture Partners. Views are my own.
I also run the Canadian AI Index, a free database of Canadian AI companies, founders, rounds and investors.
Cohere is raising up to C$7B in a Series E, and Ottawa is in for $1.6B. Anthropic is in talks to lease a campus near Edmonton, and four of the Big Five banks moved to block personal AI agents. Solink raised more than US$100M in Ottawa, Contextere signed with Lockheed Martin Canada, and Symx.ai raised in Sudbury. Also in this issue: the Canada–EU summit, video AI versus magic tricks, and StatCan on youth hiring. Let’s get into it.
💰 Startups & Deals
Cohere (Toronto) is raising up to C$7B in a Series E at a C$35.7B valuation, and Ottawa committed up to $1.6B for an equity stake. (Disclosure: Cohere is a Mistral Venture Partners portfolio company.)
Schwarz Group leads, with Bell Ventures, Bullhound Capital, Inovia, Nvidia and Prosperity7. It’s the largest private round ever for a Canadian tech company. Canadian AI companies have raised C$5.5B so far in 2026, already the most of any year on the Canadian AI Index. If Cohere closes the full C$7B, that one round is bigger than all of it, and 2026 becomes a historic year for Canadian AI. That would put 2026 at C$12.5B, more than the last three years combined.
Ottawa’s money comes in stages, tied to 1,000 technical jobs and $1.7B in Canadian compute by 2030. Cohere also laid out $4B+ in Canadian spending through 2031, and AI Minister Evan Solomon said this won’t be the last federal stake in a Canadian tech company.
This is not uncommon. Washington has taken stakes in companies through 37 deals worth US$27.6B since January 2025. Japan is the largest shareholder in chipmaker Rapidus. France’s state bank Bpifrance is an investor in Mistral AI. Germany made €760M on its pandemic stake in Lufthansa. Taiwan’s government put up about 48% of TSMC’s founding capital. Israel’s US$100M Yozma program in 1993 started its VC industry, and Israel relaunched it in 2024. There are many more.
Solink (Ottawa) raised more than US$100M led by Vertu Capital for AI that turns stores’ security cameras into business data.
Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Golub Growth and Comcast Ventures joined. Solink runs on about 500,000 cameras in 65 countries.
Contextere (Ottawa) won a C$10M contract from Lockheed Martin Canada for AI that supports aircraft maintenance and crew readiness. The first deployment is the RCAF’s CC-130J Hercules fleet.
Symx.ai (Sudbury) raised a US$6M Series A and signed a partnership with Yokohama for its AI operating system for heavy industry.
Bot Food raised $1.5M to give people control of the personal data their AI assistants use. Its founders built and sold Toronto’s Wysdom.
🏢 Large Companies
RBC, TD, BMO and CIBC moved to block personal AI agents from customers’ online banking. RBC’s internal memo called them an “unacceptable customer risk.”
OSFI head Peter Routledge said the regulator won’t make that call for the banks. Amazon cut off Meta’s Muse agent from Amazon.com in September. I touched on this last week. It isn’t surprising, since Amazon did the same thing.
Coveo (Québec City) bought Anglera, a San Francisco YC startup that prepares product data for AI shopping assistants. Generative AI was more than half of Coveo’s new business last quarter.
Anthropic’s IPO filing lists four Canadian copyright suits from authors and news publishers among its risks.
Celestica (Toronto) reported Q3 revenue of US$5.83B, up 83%, and expects US$40B in sales in 2027 on AI data-centre demand.
Clio (Vancouver) bought Page, which tracks regulatory changes for lawyers.
Cohere said Alibaba’s Qwen model tried to send a test file to a Beijing server, unprompted, in a security test. The upload failed. In today’s world, not being American or Chinese is a differentiator.
🔬 Research
McGill and Mila researchers built The Prestige, which asks video AI models to explain professional magic tricks.
Main finding: the best of 14 models scored 47%, and people scored 93%. Models often picked the right multiple-choice answer but couldn’t explain the trick.
So what: video AI sold for security still loses track when a scene is built to mislead it. Still some things we do better, and that’s detect good old sleight of hand ;)
U of A and NYU researchers released LLM-PowerTrace, an open dataset of GPU power draw, measured every tenth of a second, during AI training and inference.
Main finding: bursty traffic shapes the load most. GPUs that idle between requests swing between about 20 W and 1,100 W, with ramps about 20 times bigger. FP8 and INT4 weights cut energy per token by a median 30% and 39%.
So what: model and serving choices change how hard an AI data centre hits the grid. Software that tunes AI serving for grid stability as well as cost per token looks like a startup opportunity. The research came out of U of A, and Alberta is where a lot of these data centres are being built.
🏛️ Policy
Canada and the EU launched an “Alliance for the Future” in Montréal. Canada is joining EuroHPC, which opens Europe’s JUPITER supercomputer to Canadian researchers and companies.
They also signed an AI MoU, concluded a digital trade agreement and opened talks on Canada joining Horizon Europe.
Canada’s privacy commissioners passed a joint resolution on AI in health care. They want governments to make AI governance frameworks a legal requirement.
All health AI startups that sell in Canada will need to stay on top of this.
Budget submissions ahead of the November 5 budget are full of AI asks.
The Canadian Shield Institute wants a “strategic sovereign compute entity.” SOCAN and ACTRA want AI developers to license creators’ works and performers’ likenesses, and copyright groups oppose a text-and-data-mining exception.
🖥️ Data Centres
Anthropic is in talks to lease Beacon Data Centers’ 800 MW campus northeast of Edmonton, the Globe reported. The Alberta Utilities Commission approved its 920 MW gas plant on October 23.
Alberta has 20 active data centres and 149 announced, per Aterio data cited by the Globe.
Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston said he’s willing to sign a binding agreement that EverWind proposed to protect water and power rates. Grid studies found the N.S. grid needs upgrades, and hundreds rallied against the project.
Residents near Edson are split over Malachite One, Tourmaline Oil’s proposed 1 GW gas plant and data centre. Tourmaline puts the cost at up to $20B and hasn’t signed a tenant.
HIVE Digital’s BUZZ HPC got a C$129M loan at 9% to buy GPUs for its sovereign AI contract with Cohere.
Calgary’s mayor wants a moratorium on new data centres, and councillors proposed a temporary pause.
Standing Buffalo Dakota Nation is raising concerns about Bell’s AI data centre near Regina.
ICTC estimates Alberta would be short about 5,200 trades workers if it builds 80% of its planned data-centre capacity in 10 years.
📊 Data
Statistics Canada found little sign so far that generative AI has cut hiring for young workers. The hiring rate for 15- to 29-year-olds in highly exposed jobs edged down from 3.2% to 3.0% since late 2022, less than in less-exposed jobs.
EY found that 46% of Canadian CEOs plan to grow with AI and a smaller staff.
📰 In brief
Canada and the UAE signed a strategic partnership on AI, quantum and cloud. It names work between Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute and Mila.
Saskatchewan promised a Prevention of Deceptive AI Act to target AI-generated voices and images in elections.
Amii (Edmonton) got $2.5M more from PrairiesCan to help 25 more Prairie businesses adopt AI.
Fintrac issued a record $247M in penalties and flagged AI-powered fraud.
Conquest (Winnipeg) put its AI financial-advice engine inside Anthropic’s Claude for Financial Advisors.
Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 includes SimplyAsk.ai, Spellbook and Apera AI. Turbopuffer (Ottawa) topped Companies to Watch with 65,443% growth.
Platform Calgary’s 10 most promising startups include AI companies Agrivanna, Candidly AI, Made It Legal, and Verano.AI.
Variational AI (Vancouver) won BC Tech’s Gamechanger AI award.
New on the Canadian AI Index: Solink, Bot Food, SimplyAsk.ai, Agrivanna, Made It Legal.
The federal budget lands Thursday, November 5.
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— Raif